How does private property lead to violence?

[ThatCrazyAnarchist]

Hiya.

How does private property lead to violence?

I already know how private property is fundamentally violent, and I am not asking about this. Instead, I'm looking for a description/explanation of how private property leads to violence in the long run.

I think it's something roughly along the lines of:
my private property -> other people's poverty -> desperation -> violence as a means to escape poverty

But I want to be able to explain it clearly and concisely to capitalists (who can't see that private property is fundamentally violent), and with real-world examples.

Pls help.

[ckaihatsu]

I'd actually see the source of violence as deriving from those with *capital*, and not from those who are impoverished and desperate. Sure, there *are* petty crimes of desperation, but if you really want to talk *violence*, the best cases would be the two world wars and the innumerable military battles throughout all of recorded history.

Military warfare can be seen as just another kind of diplomacy, and diplomacy is only motivated by large-scale material interests, the kind that require a nation-state to oversee and administer, as for relatively-fixed national industries.

So basically when national industries / interests clash with those of other countries the only possible way to determine an outcome has been through militaristic violence, for geographic turf and/or foreign markets.

[Rafiq]

It's simply the fact that private property has to be maintained by violence. To have something that concerns us all in common, the source of our food and so on, and claim it is yours can only ever be sustained by force. Else, why would it be respected?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Well, what happens when a worker refuses to sell their labour-power? They don't receive any money, which means that if they try to take something from the aggregate social product, they will be violently stopped. Workers are forced to sell their labour-power or starve.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg, as it were. Workers don't coalesce from out of the aether. The proletariat is not static; it needs to be reproduced daily, both biologically (as individual proletarians don't live forever, and when profits are high and exploitation is correspondingly high they don't live for very long compared to the rest of society, either), and socially. Day after day, dispossessed direct producers need to be born, excluded from most of the social wealth, and disciplined until they obey the commands of the foremen and overseers that capitalists employ. The institution that ensures this social and biological reproduction is the family. But the workers struggle against this institution daily. So what is the bourgeoisie to do? In certain states, it simply brings down state power on the people who challenge the family - it has the authorities hang a few sodomites from cranes, throw a few women who have aborted into prison, and so on. But in modern, oh-so-enlightened states, it merely contents itself with encouraging non-state and para-state violence against these groups. Why go through the bother of torturing gays and blocking access to abortion clinics when there are imbeciles who will do it for you free of charge, and all you have to do is look the other way?

And modern capitalism is imperialist capitalism. Imperialist cartels and syndicates hold the most influence over the mutually hostile bourgeois states and divide the world's markets amongst themselves. But as in any division there are winners and losers, and the losers don't intend on being losers forever. And the markets can't be divided by peaceful means. So if Japan wants access to a greater market for its drug production, or if France needs to reminds its former colonies what state they need to keep close economic ties to, what is the result? Wars of imperialist predation, where millions of brown people die to boost the falling rate of profit of the great cartels, and eventually inter-imperialist wars where the imperialist powers gleefully butcher millions of workers. And why are the neo-colonies so profitable for the cartels? Because the businesses operating there have access to low-cost, semi-free and sometimes openly unfree labour. And in America, for example, they have access to the low-cost labour of the black colour-caste. But this colour-caste needs to be kept down - so again, the bourgeoisie can either have the state kill a few blacks on trumped-up charges or have the local Klan, neo-Nazis etc. do the same. And of course throw as many as possible into prisons. Prison labour is even cheaper.

And yet liberals don't just not see this, they outright refuse to see this. Far be it from me to tell you what to do with your time, but personally, I wouldn't bother. In nine cases out of ten, they will start ritually chanting about the nonviolence principle or something similar that they pulled out of their arses, talking about how "real" free markets are magical and good and sparkly etc.

[Comrade Jacob]

It's preserved by violence and thus causes violence.

[tuwix]

How does private property lead to violence?


From other side simple fact that one has more that another which is a result of private property existence creates a sensation of injustice. An injustice must be eliminated...

[Luís Henrique]

But I want to be able to explain it clearly and concisely to capitalists (who can't see that private property is fundamentally violent), and with real-world examples.

Pls help.

Capitalists usually know very well that private property is fundamentally violent. I suppose you intend to explain it to people who are ideologically in favour of capitalism, even though they are just sellers of labour power as everybody else.

Right wingers - particularly right wingers of the "libertarian" subspecies - usually imagine that "property" is a kind of magical or metaphysical relation between the proprietor and his stuff. But property is a relation between people and people, not between people and things. Namely, it is a relation in which one person (family, company, etc.) is entitled to the exclusive use of a given object, as opposed to the rest of mankind. That being the reason it is called private property. It is, consequently, what a Roman jurist would call a right that is oponible erga omnes, ie, against all (other people). Naturally, one individual or family would be unable to defend such exclusionary relation without organised violence - that thing that we use to call "State".

(To say the truth, even "libertarians" at least suspect of that - it being the reason that in their fantasies they usually see themselves heroically defending their mule and forty acres with their shotgun. How do they imagine it possible to resist against the rest of the world, I don't know...)

Luís Henrique